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geojim's review against another edition
2.0
A bit of a mess. I suspect you need to be a hardcore Trekkie to really enjoy this...
always_a_scientist's review against another edition
3.0
tl;dr: Expected more of "Trials and Tribble-ations," got "Edith Keller must die" x many billions.
Tonal dissonance makes this book a surprisingly difficult read. The characters of Dulmur and Lucsly were introduced in one of the most unabashedly comedic and fun episodes of the franchise. In stark contrast, the book itself is about the agents of the Department of Temporal Investigations (DTI) leading mostly grim and joyless lives as, in the words of one character, “gears in a clock.” That is true of those lucky enough not to be killed (multiple times), driven insane by the stress of the job, or simply erased from the timeline with almost no one remembering they ever existed. The main themes are duty, responsibility, self-denial, sacrifice, and letting billions be slaughtered and assimilated (or a few friends die preventable deaths) for the sake of preserving the correct timeline.
It is full of references to most (if not all) other time-travel stories in Star Trek, jokes, fan service, and puns. One of the characters even calls the mysterious future figure from Enterprise “Future Guy!” I think these elements are meant to be fun and humorous, but to me, they feel like sour notes that create painful dissonance and reinforce the overall bleakness of the story.
Dulmur abandons his wife, whom he met and married before he knew DTI existed, to go back to DTI. After that, he makes a pervy comment on Dina Elfiki; not only is it unprofessional, he makes it after she has been through her own traumatic time-travel ordeal. I think that is another attempt at humor that seems tone-deaf and mean-spirited in the context of the story. I lost a lot of respect for his character after that.
When the Sponsor (a.k.a Future Guy) is finally caught and identified, it is anticlimactic. He is a character we have never seen before and appears briefly to reveal that he is just another mad scientist using genetic engineering for evil.
I have a Ph.D. in physics, and I appreciate the significant effort and research the author put into grounding this work in real science. As far as I understand our current knowledge of physics, traveling backwards in time is not possible. Parallel universes, if they exist, cannot communicate with or affect one another. After reading this book, I am glad for that.
Tonal dissonance makes this book a surprisingly difficult read. The characters of Dulmur and Lucsly were introduced in one of the most unabashedly comedic and fun episodes of the franchise. In stark contrast, the book itself is about the agents of the Department of Temporal Investigations (DTI) leading mostly grim and joyless lives as, in the words of one character, “gears in a clock.” That is true of those lucky enough not to be killed (multiple times), driven insane by the stress of the job, or simply erased from the timeline with almost no one remembering they ever existed. The main themes are duty, responsibility, self-denial, sacrifice, and letting billions be slaughtered and assimilated (or a few friends die preventable deaths) for the sake of preserving the correct timeline.
It is full of references to most (if not all) other time-travel stories in Star Trek, jokes, fan service, and puns. One of the characters even calls the mysterious future figure from Enterprise “Future Guy!” I think these elements are meant to be fun and humorous, but to me, they feel like sour notes that create painful dissonance and reinforce the overall bleakness of the story.
Dulmur abandons his wife, whom he met and married before he knew DTI existed, to go back to DTI. After that, he makes a pervy comment on Dina Elfiki; not only is it unprofessional, he makes it after she has been through her own traumatic time-travel ordeal. I think that is another attempt at humor that seems tone-deaf and mean-spirited in the context of the story. I lost a lot of respect for his character after that.
When the Sponsor (a.k.a Future Guy) is finally caught and identified, it is anticlimactic. He is a character we have never seen before and appears briefly to reveal that he is just another mad scientist using genetic engineering for evil.
I have a Ph.D. in physics, and I appreciate the significant effort and research the author put into grounding this work in real science. As far as I understand our current knowledge of physics, traveling backwards in time is not possible. Parallel universes, if they exist, cannot communicate with or affect one another. After reading this book, I am glad for that.
ury949's review against another edition
5.0
This was good - very good. I don't know how anyone could write something like this, but it surely must be someone who's life is so steeped in Star Trek and time travel that these story sequences just come naturally. Mr. Bennett is someone I'd like to meet and talk to, I think!
Love it, love it. I love that adrift feeling you get when your trying to find your way around through three dimensions of time - as is done in this book. Never have I fought through such a mishmash of past, uptime, has happened, might happen, parallel and converging timelines. But it's not a mishmash; indeed, when you finish up and step back it ends up being a complete mosaic of a very complicated story. Not only are there multiple timelines and people displaced in time, but it also jumps forward and backwards telling present story-lines intermixed with backstories, all while incorporating a battalion of characters from dozens of different species each with their own sub-groups, historical races, and temporal investigators. This book might touch on every time travel episode in Star Trek canon. Knowing your Star Trek (ships, species, characters, time periods) is helpful (necessary?) to keeping the story from becoming totally muddled. And yet with the right amount of focus and ability to push through without getting bogged down, this book comes together with a nice tidy ending (not very likely in time travel, but something you come to expect in Star Trek, making the two genres a bit of a juxtaposition.)
The time-travel doesn't get too paradoxy until the last quarter, but man is it worth it. At the crux of the action everything is so mixed up and happening so fast, I really don't think there is a correct or original timeline to ever get back to. It almost becomes an effort just to keep your own history intact so you don't cease to exist!
Perhaps my favorite character was Meneth, the Simperian civet familiar (yes, like witches have) of one of the Aegis agents (ancient preservers of the timeline). This non-canon cat growls and squeaks, yet is somehow a step ahead of most of the Starfleet officers and temporal agents when it comes to problem solving, and is hands-down (paws-down?) superior at negotiations.
Unfortunately a great deal of the story circles around a Deltan agent and his time-displaced human partner who is ga-ga enthralled with him. Deltans are known for their powerful sexual relationships - a form of emotional bonding that is vital to their mental and physical health and well-being. I say this is unfortunate because it creates a quite pathetic and child-like reaction in his partner, Teresa, who is human and thus mentally inferior and would be ruined for life if she ever got involved with him. Even though she's well aware of that, it's such a cliche, "I must have you at any cost/Sorry, I'm just too hot to handle/Waa - it's not fair!" situation, strait down to his Herculean gorgeousness, that I kinda just wish I didn't have to read it, let alone it be an integral part of the plot. But then I watch any early Star Trek episode and am reminded just how women are portrayed in Star Trek's advanced civilization, even in the light of all the backwards chauvinism found in other non-Federation species, and I guess having this theme in the story is right on target.
I'm trying to think if there's anyone I know who I'd recommend this book to. No, I guess not, but gosh I wish I did - that person would be awesome to nerd out with! I'm absolutely going to seek out the next and following books in this series, although something tells me the order in which I read them will not matter since sequential time is basically and illusion. ;P
Albert Einstein once reportedly said that "Time is what keeps everything from happening at once." Unfortunately, that was no longer true in Professor Vard's lunar facility. Something had turned the timeline into a mulidimensional knot. Past, present, and future had become interchangeable, completely nonlinear. Lucsly deeply hated that. It left him feeling adrift, unsure of himself.
Love it, love it. I love that adrift feeling you get when your trying to find your way around through three dimensions of time - as is done in this book. Never have I fought through such a mishmash of past, uptime, has happened, might happen, parallel and converging timelines. But it's not a mishmash; indeed, when you finish up and step back it ends up being a complete mosaic of a very complicated story. Not only are there multiple timelines and people displaced in time, but it also jumps forward and backwards telling present story-lines intermixed with backstories, all while incorporating a battalion of characters from dozens of different species each with their own sub-groups, historical races, and temporal investigators. This book might touch on every time travel episode in Star Trek canon. Knowing your Star Trek (ships, species, characters, time periods) is helpful (necessary?) to keeping the story from becoming totally muddled. And yet with the right amount of focus and ability to push through without getting bogged down, this book comes together with a nice tidy ending (not very likely in time travel, but something you come to expect in Star Trek, making the two genres a bit of a juxtaposition.)
The time-travel doesn't get too paradoxy until the last quarter, but man is it worth it. At the crux of the action everything is so mixed up and happening so fast, I really don't think there is a correct or original timeline to ever get back to. It almost becomes an effort just to keep your own history intact so you don't cease to exist!
Spoiler
Fortunately, albeit hilariously, even after the fierce battle in which many people died, some numerous times, "there were enough temporal and quantum spares that the final survival rate was effectively one hundred percent."
Ducane-3 studied his own tricorder. "It's a subspace fracture. An after-effect of the temporal disruptor."
"You mean a before-effect," Noi said. "Retrocausal echoes of an event that hasn't happened yet."
"Like the ones that drew us here in the first pace," Elfiki said.
"And tipped off everyone in the future about this 'secret' conference," Noi added.
Worf frowned. "But are they not the ones whose intervention caused the distortions?"
"They were," Rodal said. "They just didn't know it yet."
"The disruptor will interact with the other temporal fields," Ducane-3 went on, "warping spacetime severely enough to create rifts bracketing the detonation time. Don't know why the quantum lock isn't stopping them . . . we must have shifted back to before it was activated."
Perhaps my favorite character was Meneth, the Simperian civet familiar (yes, like witches have) of one of the Aegis agents (ancient preservers of the timeline). This non-canon cat growls and squeaks, yet is somehow a step ahead of most of the Starfleet officers and temporal agents when it comes to problem solving, and is hands-down (paws-down?) superior at negotiations.
Unfortunately a great deal of the story circles around a Deltan agent and his time-displaced human partner who is ga-ga enthralled with him. Deltans are known for their powerful sexual relationships - a form of emotional bonding that is vital to their mental and physical health and well-being. I say this is unfortunate because it creates a quite pathetic and child-like reaction in his partner, Teresa, who is human and thus mentally inferior and would be ruined for life if she ever got involved with him. Even though she's well aware of that, it's such a cliche, "I must have you at any cost/Sorry, I'm just too hot to handle/Waa - it's not fair!" situation, strait down to his Herculean gorgeousness, that I kinda just wish I didn't have to read it, let alone it be an integral part of the plot. But then I watch any early Star Trek episode and am reminded just how women are portrayed in Star Trek's advanced civilization, even in the light of all the backwards chauvinism found in other non-Federation species, and I guess having this theme in the story is right on target.
I'm trying to think if there's anyone I know who I'd recommend this book to. No, I guess not, but gosh I wish I did - that person would be awesome to nerd out with! I'm absolutely going to seek out the next and following books in this series, although something tells me the order in which I read them will not matter since sequential time is basically and illusion. ;P
even_steven's review against another edition
adventurous
lighthearted
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
2.0
DNF at 33%. I really gave this one a try. In principle, it’s nice to get a story so far removed from the typical Star Trek narratives and characters. Lucsly and Dulmur could be fascinating characters if written more three-dimensionally. However, this book suffers from a lack of narrative structure. I get the sense the author didn’t have every chapter planned out neatly and so there are occasionally whole sections that feel superfluous or out of place. The narrative does not progress at a satisfactory pace, because it feels like the author makes too many unnecessary asides. The level of research into Trek lore and instances of time travel across multiple series is commendable, but the story itself is a slog.
rebecita's review against another edition
The main characters are detectives whose names are anagrams of Mulder and Scully. I cannot unsee this.
spiffytools's review against another edition
emotional
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
4.0
frakalot's review against another edition
5.0
Time travel stories > mirror universe stories.
Bennett is one Trek author that you can always rely on to do the homework and seamlessly integrate existing lore with exciting new stories that still feel like genuine Star Trek adventures.
Bennett is one Trek author that you can always rely on to do the homework and seamlessly integrate existing lore with exciting new stories that still feel like genuine Star Trek adventures.
judenoseinabook's review against another edition
3.0
Took me a while to pick up on the ongoing story as it jumped around in different times and story lines. Once I'd tuned in I enjoyed it and will read more of the series.
hyliansidekick's review against another edition
adventurous
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
ren0901's review against another edition
4.0
Good read but some time consuming grind...
...good plots (though flashbacks & flashforwards can be confusing) and characters. Don't expect a linear read...this time travel story has plenty of twists, turns, and loops. Bennett did a good job tying in previous ST characters & events. For me, the effort was worth it...
...good plots (though flashbacks & flashforwards can be confusing) and characters. Don't expect a linear read...this time travel story has plenty of twists, turns, and loops. Bennett did a good job tying in previous ST characters & events. For me, the effort was worth it...